WHO'S THERE?

Hamlet's father returns from the grave, as Lavinia returns from the woods, in a “questionable shape” (I.iv.43). In both cases something strange and silent, familiar and unfamiliar, comes on to the stage, posing a problem of interpretation like that of the ghost in The Spanish Tragedy: “My name was Don Andrea.” The Hamlet Ghost, in full armor, looks imposing and powerful, a male figure to command respect as well as fear – in that sense the opposite of the mutilated Lavinia. But it too has a dislocated identity, and when in I.v it describes its own death, we learn that beneath the armor is another violated body.

Lavinia is bombarded with questions; so is the Ghost, and again the questions break against silence. Like Marcus' “This was thy daughter,” the wording of Horatio's question shows how problematic the Ghost's identity is:

He asks not “Who art thou?” but “What art thou?” – seeing the Ghost not as the late King Hamlet but as a nameless thing that has usurped (the word is unsettling applied to something that looks like a king) the form of the late King Hamlet. The first reference to the Ghost is to “this thing” (I.i.24), and throughout the dialogue it is not “he” but “it.”